London's Muslim Brotherhood's Role In Instigating WWIII

March 4th, 2012 • 9:42 AM

The just-exposed alliance which links Barack Obama with the late Osama bin Laden's "Al Qaeda" against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, is only a part of a much bigger and older alliance. The so-called Syrian National Council (SNC) of Paris-based Burhan Ghalioun, which London, Paris and Obama are trying to fashion into an alternative Syrian government for an international war against Assad, has been exposed as a front for the one of the oldest Islamist organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan al-Muslimun, created and directed by British imperialism out of London. [See www.larouchepub.com /eiw/public/2006/2006_1-9/2006_1-9/2006-7 /pdf/47-51_607_natbook.pdf]

The Paris daily Le Point wrote Jan. 29 that if the major leaders of the SNC are secular, the [voting] majority of the council is made up of Syrian Islamists financed by Qatar. Thus it is no coincidence that the SNC's Feb. 9 congress took place there, and that Qatar financed the Feb. 24 meeting of the "Friends of Syria" in Tunis, where the SNC had top billing in the middle of about 60 countries. The paper quoted researcher Fabrice Balanche, who said that the SNC is not the product of the Syrian opposition, but a very disparate group constituted and financed by Qatar and supported by France. It is made up only of exiles, who have but little contact with the revolt on the ground.

Researcher Barah Mikail added that to dissipate [Western] fears, the SNC communicates through spokesmen in "suits and ties." Its president, Burhan Ghalioun, has lived in France for 30 years; its foreign affairs head, Bassma Kodmani, for 43!

The most thorough exposure of the fact that the SNC is nothing but an Ikhwan front with a deceptive veneer of secularist professors, comes from London itself through the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), the London controlling "mother lodge" for American neo-cons, in a report dated February 2012 by the HJS PR Director Michael Weiss and Hamza Fakher. Fakher is a London-based and London-controlled Syrian who partners with Ausama Monajed of the so-called "Syrian Observatory of Human Rights" to produce the fraudulent daily Syrian casualty-figures which are peddled by most world press outlets and the United Nations.

But what can be checked in Fakher's report does check out; a case of one British agent trying to off another. Weiss and Fakher contend that the SNC would be a more workable vehicle for regime-change in Syria if they were running it rather than the Ikhwan.

When the SNC was inaugurated in August 2011, a full one-third of the names released for its General Assembly were recognized Ikhwan members. Of nineteen names of its Executive Committee published in October, eight were Ikhwan members and two were Ikhwan allies. Later, the Executive Committee was renamed the Secretariat General, and a new Executive Committee of five was created, containing one Muslim Brother, two Ikhwan allies, Ghalioun and one other person. It was later expanded to eight by addition of Muslim Brother Ahmad Ramadan and two allies of Ghalioun.

Fakher thinks the Ikhwan has begun to dominate the SNC through its contol of its finances and its close relations with the Turkish government, which supervised the creation of the SNC and has significant influence there.

Syria's Kurdish minority, estimated at 10-15% of the population, had been allocated fewer seats than the Muslim Brotherhood. All these are assumed to be among the reasons that the Syrian Kurds "suspended" their membership in the SNC, further contributing to what Fakher calls its "stark demographic underrepresentation of ethnic and minority groups" in Syria.

One of the most notable Muslim Brothers in the SNC is Ahmad Ramadan, who produced the "Voice of Jihadists" program in Iraq during the 1990s. He then directed Hamas' Al-Quds Press International News Agency from 2004 until April 2011. Although the Al-Quds Press offices were in the suburbs of Beirut, it had no license to operate from Lebanon and was formally registered in London. "Ramadan is currently head of the Media and Public Relations Department of the SNC and, although although he is not listed among its Muslim Brotherhood Alliance bloc members, he has apparently established a for-profit media organization in the United Kingdom, yet to be publicly launched, which will aim to spearhead and perhaps even dominate the SNC's media campaign. Ramadan enlisted three other reputed Ikhwan members to run his Media Department, leading to complaints of how its members are unilaterally selected rather than elected. One SNC representative not affiliated with the Brotherhood, quit the Media Bureau because of what he said was an "Islamist takeover."

In response, Ghalioun's bloc has established its own counterpart PR bureau within the President's Office.

The most influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood bloc in the SNC is Ali Sadreddine al-Bayanouni, a three-term chairman of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (1996-2008), despite the fact that he is not technically a member of the SNC. Al-Bayanouni's role within the Council is demonstrated by his role as the primary public spokesman prior to the appointment of Ghalioun as SNC president.

Ghazwan al-Masri, a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's Executive Committee, fled to Turkey in the early 1980s and became a successful businessmen, obtaining a Turkish passport as "Gazi Masirli." He is a former vice-president and current Mideast Coordinator for Musiad, a Turkish Muslim businessmen's association formed to compete with Tusiad, the biggest secular business and industrial organization. In 2000, he became a trustee of the European Trust, which is part of the Federation of Islamic Organizations of Europe and has been accused of being affiliated with Muslim Brotherhood groups.

"Through Musiad, Masirli has close relations with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and President Gul. This is most apparent in two Turkish-based NGOs which are funded and sponsored by the ruling AKP Party: Insan Hak ve Huriyeti (IHH) and Mazlumder. IHH, which garnered international attention for its lead role in the 2010 Free Gaza flotilla affair, is an Islamic charity. It is so closely associated with AKP that it was dubbed a governmental nongovernmental organization (or GNGO) by some prominent Turkish journalists. According to Yavuz Dede, a senior IHH official, Erdogan has extended direct support to the organization. No less than a quarter of the IHH senior leadership holds or held positions in AKP, or were candidates for public office under its banner. The IHH also has strong ties to Hamas through the Union of Good, a Qatari-based coalition of charities headed by the noted cleric Youssef al-Qaradawi, who is likely the single most important Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader in the Arab world. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the Union of Good is a specially designated terrorist entity because of its fundraising efforts for Palestinian Hamas.

"Turkey considers the Syrian refugees in its territory to be 'guests,' not refugees. According to the Turkish government, they therefore are strictly under its control and not subject to the international law governing the treatment of refugees. The UN has not been permitted to have any major involvement with the Syrian refugees in Turkey, either in terms of oversight or additional assistance. Turkey has generally impeded media access to the camps, and has restricted many of the refugees' basic freedoms. Many refugees have quit the camps to live alone in the forests on the mountainous borders between the Syrian province of Idleb and the Turkish province of Hatay. At present, only the Muslim Brotherhood reportedly has uncontested access to the camps through IHH and Mazlumder. The main facilitators for that access are two Muslim Brotherhood members of the SNC, Khaled Khouja and Muhammad Tayfour, and Gazi Masirli."

When Turkish PM Erdogan visited the U.S. in September 2011, he promised he would open the Syrian refugee camps in Turkey to international media, but he has yet to do so. http://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SNC.pdf